TRIPOLI: A charity monitoring migrant boats in the Mediterranean said on Sunday around 47 people on a boat it had earlier warned the Italian government was in distress off the coast of Libya had drowned.
A hotline used by migrants in distress, Alarm Phone, tweeted that it had first alerted Italian authorities early on Saturday morning to the “urgent distress situation” of a boat at the northwest of Benghazi.
“We are in deep shock. According to various sources, dozens of people from this boat in distress have drowned,” tweeted Alarm Phone Sunday.
The statement from Alarm Phone comes exactly 14 days after a shipwreck off the southern Italian coast of Calabria in which nearly 76 migrants drowned.
Italian govt failed to save drowning migrants
Italy’s government is facing sharp criticism that it failed to intervene to save the drowning migrants.
Earlier on Sunday, Alarm Phone tweeted that three merchant vessels were at the scene. However, said it did not know if a rescue operation was in progress because it had lost contact with the boat.
A previous tweet from the hotline said one of the vessels, the Basilis L, was monitoring the boat. At the same time, it awaited the arrival of the Libyan coastguard “to force the people back to Libya where they had tried to escape from.”
SeaWatch, a German NGO, tweeted that its surveillance plane had spotted the migrant boat that was “dangerously overcrowded and in frightening waves.”
Nearby was “a merchant vessel that the Rescue Coordination Center in Rome ordered to coordinate with the Libyan coastguard,” it said.
On Saturday, around two hours later, SeaWatch tweeted again. “While the weather is deteriorating and making rescue operation difficult, Tripoli claims it is unable to dispatch a patrol boat,” the tweet read.
“Many times in the past Italian officials have coordinated rescue operations in this area. We ask that the same coordination be done, avoiding new deaths.”
